Mark Reviews Movies: MONDAY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2021

Who would imagine that a relationship between two wholly shallow people, founded entirely on sex and trying to evade any kind of responsibility, could be a recipe for inevitable disaster? The answer, of course, is everyone, but it's unlikely that anyone would imagine the depiction of such a relationship could be as dull as it is in Monday.

Co-writer/director Argyris Papadimitropoulos' movie is a slog of a doomed romance for an assortment of reasons. Its characters are unlikeable and only become more so as the story progresses. There's almost nothing to these people beneath their attractive exteriors and their internal miseries, either.

Such qualities—or the lack thereof—don't necessarily mean that a story about such characters is going to automatically fail, of course. Papadimitropoulos and co-screenwriter Rob Hayes, though, don't give us any reason to care about these characters, beyond the facts that they're attractive and miserable, or this relationship, beyond the fact that they like to have a lot of sex at the start and gradually have a lot less of it.

The quickly established couple is made up of Mickey (Sebastian Stan), a professional DJ and occasional composer, and Chloe (Denise Gough), an immigration attorney. The two Americans meet on a Friday night at a party in Athens, where Mickey is providing the music and Chloe is distraught about a recently ended relationship. They get drunk, have sex on a nearby beach, and introduce themselves to each other the next morning while in a police car.

Mickey has been living in Greece for seven years with no plans to leave. Chloe has been there for 18 months, and she's heading back to the United States for a new job in about a day. A lot of contrivances lead to the two hanging out together for the rest of the day, going to another party, and having plenty of more sex. When it ends, Mickey chases Chloe to the airport for a big romantic gesture. On another Friday sometime in the near future, the two are about to move in together.

The rest of the movie follows the couple as they, well, hang out together or with friends, do a bunch of mundane things, argue a bit, and have some more sex—on the beach, in bed, atop a table, on a couch in the open-air cargo hold of a van. We learn that Mickey is the father of an unseen 6-year-old boy, and while he says he wants joint custody with the kid's mother (played by Elli Tringou), Mickey seems to go out of his way to do anything about that (The opportunity just conveniently falls into his lap by the end, and to little surprise, he almost immediately sabotages the possibility).

Chloe had been dating fellow attorney Christos (Andreas Konstantinou), and the relationship didn't end well. That's about all we get about her in terms of characterization, and one assumes it's because any kind of depth beyond that would ruin the illusion that someone would drop her life for the immature, irresponsible, self-centered, and self-destructive Mickey. Chloe does, though, and all of the plentiful evidence and missed opportunities for her to leave him don't paint her in too good a picture, either.

The story is more a series of rambling, aimless vignettes of this relationship, each one taking place on or immediately after a given Friday (meaning we're just biding our time until the screen flashes "Monday" in big letters). We watch them move boxes and a big couch. We watch them laugh and fight and grow increasingly silent with each other. We watch them throw a party (where the friends of each one get into disagreements and arguments with each other, because the misery, apparently, shouldn't stop with the couple) and ruin someone's wedding reception with their respective dramas, insecurities, and drunkenness.

The whole thing climaxes with a wild night out, where booze and cocaine fuel some really bad decisions and a naked chase with the cops. Since the relationship begins with nudity and the police, we know the screenwriters put at least some semblance of thought into this story.

The weirdest thing about Monday is that Papadimitropoulos seems to treat the doomed nature of this relationship as a surprise. What more could two people want than to be attractive and empty together? Maybe these two don't want any more than that, but we most assuredly want a lot more to them.

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